Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

desiring linguistic drift, delirium as an a-signifying trajectory of words,

sounds, writing, images, the body – in short, the sign. And therapy con-

sists in liberating a-signifying flows because they create new assemblages

and eventually put in motion unforeseen signifying chains that did not

succeed in manifesting themselves before because they were blocked by

dominant assemblages of meaning, by obsessions, by social and linguistic

laws, and by communicative double binds that generated neuroses and

the pressure to repeat.

Schizoanalysis obviously does not consist in miming schizophrenia,

but in crossing, like it, the barriers of non-sense which prohibit

access to a-signifying nuclei of subjectivation, the only way to shift

petrified systems of modelization. (Chaosmosis, 68)

Bridges over the abyss

Guattari’s thought provoked a change in the image of thought and in

the function that we attribute to philosophy. On the one hand, the

planes intersect in such a way as not to allow any separation between

schizoanalytic, ecological, political and philosophical planes. On the

other hand (and here the discussion leads us inevitably to Gilles

Deleuze and their work in common), we can no longer speak of philo-

sophy if we do not speak about the eventual abyss over which the

philosopher, this happy sage, walks.

What is the eventual abyss? It is the full awareness of the non-being of

sense, of the ontological non-foundation of sense. And at the same time,

it is the consciousness of sense’s purely eventual, conjectural and circum-

stantial character as the projection of a world that is alive insofar as it is a

world of experience, of irradiation, of relations, of friendships, love, pro-

jects, promises and challenges. Over the eventual abyss stretch weak

bridges: the bridges of philosophy, that is, of friendship. This is the

discourse that Deleuze and Guattari deploy in their final book, What Is

Philosophy?

In the introduction, ‘The Question Then ...’, Gilles and Félix ques-

tion the sense of the anti-universalist, anti-structuralist, and anti-

historicist philosophy that was outlined through their work.

The question of what is philosophy?can perhaps be posed only late

in life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking con-

cretely ... [Those who asked the question before] were not sober

enough. There was too much desire to do philosophy to wonder

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